What Is A Medical Laboratory
A medical laboratory is a place where the tests for the clinical specimen will be done in order to get the information needed for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of a disease on a patient. Clinical laboratories focus on applied science mainly on the production-like basis not like the research laboratories that focus on basic science on an academic basis.
There are two departments when it comes to laboratory medicine and each department will be subdivided into different units. This article will provide you with the two departments below.
Anatomic pathology – this department will include cytopathology, electron microscopy, and histopathology. Academically, each of the units can be studied alone in a single course. Physiology, pathology, pathophysiology, and histology are the other courses that you can get from this department.
Clinical pathology that includes the following:
Clinical microbiology – this surrounds five different units of science. The units included here are mycology, immunology, parasitology, virology, and bacteriology.
Clinical chemistry: the units included in this section are enzymology, endocrinology, toxicology, and the instrumental analysis of blood components.
Hermatology – the manual and automated analysis of blood cells are under this section. The two subunits in this section are the blood bank and coagulation.
Genetics is studied also alongside a subspecialty which is the cytogenetics.
Reproductive biology – you can find the assisted reproductive technology, semen analysis, and sperm bank in this section.
The distribution of clinical laboratories to each health institutions will be different from place to place. An example for this is that some health institutions will have one lab intended for microbiology while some will not have a lab for microbiology but will have different labs for each unit.
Learn more about the detailed analysis of the role of each laboratory equipment for hermatology and urinalysis below.
You should know that any clinical specimen can be received by microbiology like the possible infected tissue, synovial fluids, cerebrospinal fluid, sputum, blood, urine, feces, and swabs. The main task here is focused with cultures, to find out the suspected pathogens that will be further identified with several biochemical tests if found. A sensitivity test will also be done in order to know if the pathogen is resistant or sensitive to a prescribed medicine, simply check this company. The results will be reported with the determined organism or organisms, and the type and number of drugs that will be given to the patient.
Different types of medical laboratories
In a lot of countries, most of the medical specimens will be processed in two main medical laboratories. The patients will undergo tests in hospital laboratories that you can find in several hospitals. The samples from health clinics, general practitioners, clinical research sites, and insurance companies will be analyzed in private laboratories. You can look into a website if you want to know more about medical laboratories.